Juri Strumpflohner

Juri is a full stack developer and tech lead with a special passion for the web and frontend development. He creates online videos for Egghead.io, writes articles on his blog and for tech magazines, occasionally speaks at conferences and holds training workshops.

Learn how to inject the window object into your Angular components

Remember the $window object in Angular 1? Turned out to be quite useful from now and then. But what about Angular? $window doesn't exist there. What's the alternative? How can I inject the Window object into my Angular components?

Contents are based on Angular version >=2

Referencing global browser objects like document or window directly from within your code is possible, but not encouraged and considered bad practice.

Especially Angular isn’t only designed to run within your browser, but also on mobiles, the server or web workers where objects like window may not be available.
Therefore the suggested approach is to wrap such objects and inject them through the dependency injection mechanism. This way it is possible to change the concrete runtime instance of a given object based on the environment the Angular application is running. The result we wanna achieve is the following:

Register WindowRef as provider

Great, so far we’ve wrapped our window object. We aren’t ready yet, however. We first need to register our injectable service. This is done by registering it on the NgModule’s providers array or directly on the component, based on the scope of our provider. Check out the official docs on providers for more details.